by SUZAN STILL
The questions descended deeper and deeper into the depths where gas rumbles and gurgles in the intestinal pipes – right down to the second chakra which, as every true Californian knows, is the level at which survival issues are housed.
It was as if an elevator cable had broken and a freefall into the emotional basement were in full plummet. You would have thought Heddi was about to become a street person, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping on window ledges...
“Oh...Sorry, Pearl – no offense meant.”
Why is she speaking of this in the past tense? Is she under some delusion that she’s passed the danger point? Hardly!
For entire weeks, all she’s been able to do is cry. No... cry is scarcely the word. Weep. Wail. Carry on. Wring hands, saturate tissues, dissolve through tears into helplessness and hopelessness.
Sometimes, she even acts out. She throws things. She screams. All she’s wanted – longed for, searched for, demanded – is escape from the pain.
Heddi is aware that Ondine and Betty are both staring at her in disbelief. She ignores them. There’s a certain perverse satisfaction in coming out of the closet of her analytical cloak, with producing astonishment.
When she can think of anyone else at all, she thinks about her neurotic analysands and a whole new appreciation for their plight begins to simmer in the cold cauldron of her heart. When the rug has been pulled out from under you emotionally, no matter how solid your financial and social picture may be, a floating anxiety buoys you through life like a rubber duck riding heavy surf. It’s the very inner emptiness that keeps you afloat.
They taught her all about this during her psychiatry residency and in Zurich at the Institute. It was couched in abstracted clinical terms: lack of appropriate affect, dissociation, repression. She passed tests requiring this information. For years, her clinical notes have been filled with terminology appropriately describing just this passage in a patient’s life, always with that edge of superiority that the well feel when dealing with the sick.
So now it’s Heddi at her analyst’s office, snuffling, pleading for Prozac. And it’s he observing her with that vaguely superior glance, that slightly amused twinkle, refusing.
It’s Heddi screaming at him that he let her down and he saying calmly that that is an interesting projection. And it’s she leaving the fifty-minute hour as empty and unsatisfied as when she went in.
She wonders if Dr. Copeland is beginning to dread her appointments the way she dreads Ondine’s? Or if the smug Dr. Copeland’s marriage is as vertiginously imperiled as hers was? Is his lack of empathy imagined, or is he the next to gain experiential understanding that pride, indeed, goeth before a fall?
It’s doesn’t matter. Heddi doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Dr. Copeland or his equally smug wife. Everyone seems smug to her these days. Everyone looks as if they are sassy and well fed and in the know, as if they are seeing right into her shattered interior, pitying her. Coolly, gently, heartlessly ostracizing her for committing that most cardinal social sin: experiencing her genuine, raw, emotions – and showing it.
But there’s the real rub. She’s not experiencing her genuine emotions. Even in this wasted state, she’s astute enough to know this about herself: she’s not being authentic, at all.
Oh, she’s creating plenty of Sturm und Drang, but it’s all play-acting. The real truth is, it’s all just the howl of the wounded ego. Her humbled pride. Her hubris...
In her inner acting out, though, she’s throwing herself against a glass wall, hammering and yammering and pounding to get out of this vitrine she’s inhabited. And what’s outside of it, should she be so lucky – or so unfortunate – as to break through? Is it Truth or Madness or Authenticity that she dimly views through the darkened glass?
She’s not got a clue. And therein lies the terror.
“Oh my! Look! It’s already lunchtime!”
Pearl
Well, alls Pearl cain say is, that Heady is ratly named. Pearl’s Granny use ter ax, What’s in a name? an Pearl never did know quite what she was drivin at. But she thinks this here bout clears it up.
Now, Heady’s axed Pearl ta tell more bout hersef, but Pearl points out that that Sophia gal ain’t told her story yet. She been hidin behind that thar colored gal lak she was a duck blind.
Fair’s fair. An besides, Pearl’s jes enjoyin coolin her heels today. Ain’t gotta go out an hustle. Got plenty a food. All the coffee she cain drink.
She don’t ratly feel lak bein bothered today. Let one a them other gals go a-huntin fer possum. Pearl’s gonna set rat here an smoke her pipe.
Sophia
“Well, I’m not sure what to tell you, but I do know I’ve been thinking a lot these past two days and maybe you’d be interested in that.”
It says in the Bible that in the end times, young women will begin to dream dreams. That’s kind of vague – women, young and old, have always dreamed dreams. Sophia’s sure that from the super-conservative pulpits of this land, preachers have found ways to turn that against women – probably by considering dreams as fantasies or diversions from the truth or instruments of Satan – because in many ways, the Inquisition never stopped; the hatred of the feminine seems eternal, and the flames of the Burning Times still cast their lurid light and black shadows across the earth.
When you’ve lived long enough interiorly like Sophia has, though – and she’s surely no young woman – you come to know that dreams are anything but fantasies. Dreams are the bucket that pulls up the living waters of our own deep knowing.
Before the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1987 – the one that flattened the freeway overpasses in Oakland and dropped the roadway out of the center span of the Bay Bridge – Sophia had a dream, maybe three weeks before. She saw the collapsed sections of concrete stacked like pancakes. There were emergency vehicles and medical personnel tending to people on the ground.
When the earthquake happened and everyone was in shock, Sophia wasn’t. She was sad because of the loss of life but she wasn’t surprised. Because of things like that – and it started when she was a really young child – she’s learned to pay attention to her dreams.
But when she awakens most mornings, feeling shaken by what she’s seen in the night, she often hasn’t a clue what her nighttime visions might mean. That’s the funny part about these powers that visit her. Sometimes, they give information before the fact that is only relevant after the fact. What’s the use of that?
No use, as far as she can see. So she’s had to start considering herself an imperfect vehicle. The information’s there, but she can’t carry it all into the light of day. Things fall off and get left in the weedy margins of wakefulness.
The only thing she can really rely on is her Little Voice. It knows everything and with complete assurance, but its visitations are sporadic and she can’t summon it up at will.
Pearl’s nodding her head as she squints at Sophia through a cloud of pipe smoke. The others, however, are looking confused.
“How do you know the difference between your little voice and just imagining something?” It’s Heddi, direct and clinical.
“I don’t know how I know, Heddi. It’s...a kind of quickening, I guess. Sort of like jumping into cold water on a hot day. My entire system – body, mind, and spirit – just comes alive in a burst.”
“It’s more a powerful sensation, then?”
“Yes... I feel it very strongly...”
Ondine interjects in a voice too soft to hear.
“I’m sorry, Ondine...what’s that?”
Ondine gives a little cough and almost whispers, “You’ve always heard this voice, then?”
“Yes, I’ve always had this ability for as long as I can remember.”
“Why do you think you have this, while others don’t?” Heddi, again, her tone dubious, obviously thinking this sounds a lot like inflation.
“I attribute it directly to having spent my entire life on a mountaintop, away from the barrage of civilization.”
“What do you m
ean?” It’s Betty, this time, who’s never been on a mountaintop in her entire life.
“I mean, things like electronic bombardment from telephones and television...”
“You had no television, growing up?”
“No. Not even electric lights until I was five.”
Pearl’s chuckling softly to herself, as Betty exclaims in astonishment, “Where did you live...Siberia?”
“It may as well have been, I guess.”
“So no electronic assault. What else?” Heddi asks, sounding unconvinced.
“No socializing influences, like church, or even Girl Scouts. Not even other kids close by to play with. I was just left to my own devices and I guess it’s a kind of instinctive ability that grew out of being in nature all the time.”
“What about your parents? Didn’t they try to influence you?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Heddi... I just sort of grew like Topsy, as my mother used to say. My parents were busy with the business of survival. I was just left on my own most of the time – which was fine with me – and that allowed my inner being free rein.”
Ondine, from the depths of her coddled years, is trying to understand. “I think I get it. Something similar happens to me when I’m painting or sculpting. It’s like another intelligence steps in. But, Sophia, it must have been so difficult for you, as a child. What was it like to be so neglected?”
“What was it like? Well...”
As a child, she loped around the mountain like the spawn of the Wild Mother; one of those mythical beasts half imaginative child, half instinctual creature or bird. She was always rooting in the underbrush like a fox kit nosing for the teat, plunging fearlessly into gullies that smelled of moisture, leaf mold and minerals leaching from the red clay banks. Snakes, spiders, lizards and bats were part curiosity, part kin. She could read the adventures of the night in the baby’s handprint of the raccoon, the black spiraling scat of the skunk and the owl’s lost feathers, like some children read comics.
In ravines where water rises in furtive springs that trickle through mossy stones, she met the elfin strain, the familial bloodline that dangled like roots back into the invisibles, the magical half-wild ones, carriers of culture too ancient and rich to fathom...
“You mean fairies?” Heddi interrupts, barely maintaining a courteous neutrality. It’s all she can do to keep a mocking smile battened down.
Sophia doesn’t answer. Her lips clamp down and it appears that she’ll be stubborn about opening them again. An awkward silence ensues.
“Tante Collette used to say there were nature beings that inhabited Quatre Vents,” Ondine finally says, timidly. “She called them incantadas or demoiselles. She said they’re particularly fond of Quatre Vents because it’s associated with wind and water. I guess the demoiselles can summon up the wind at will, and calm it just as quickly. And the incantadas live near water.”
“Really,” Heddi counters, deadpan.
“Yes. She told me when I was little that une petite demoiselle guarded the spring that feeds the fauntain, and lived inside a little carved door at its base. She said the demoiselle wore a little white dress with a blue sash, and flowers grew at her feet wherever she walked. I used to pick flowers and leave them on the little doorstep.”
“Children are much more sensitive to these things than grownups,” says Sophia, coming out of her stubborn silence. “And they just naturally know how to honor the Others by performing rituals for them.”
“Yes,” Ondine agrees. “And apparently, it goes both ways – the demoiselles are very protective of children and of the country people, and can be quite fierce when they think an injustice has been done to them.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!” Betty chimes in.
There is a short but pregnant silence broken by Pearl’s rough cackle. “Ever Choctaw child knows theys creatures out thar in the woods an prairies. Theys smart – they don’t stick round whar people is, but theys thar, an they gots ta hold the entire web a thins together. That’s they job. Without them little people, wouldn’t nothin grow nor water flow, mah Granny used ter say.”
Another awkward silence follows, finally broken by Heddi.
“Jung wrote extensively on the archetypes,” she intones professorially. “And indigenous peoples the world over believe in a realm of diminutive nature spirits. I guess we don’t need to settle that issue today.
“Why don’t you continue, Sophia? Tell us more about growing up on the mountain.”
Well, the point Sophia’s trying to make is that she grew up like a feral child, really. Barefooted, scratch-legged, curly-headed with leaves in the coils, skinny, mal-nourished and bold, she could track a deer for miles along trails roofed in bear clover, the cloven, heart-shaped impressions like Hansel and Gretel’s white stones in reverse, leading her deeper and deeper into unknown territory, into mystery.
She was always more lost than found, more in danger than safe, but she knew herself to be watched over. There were eyes everywhere, all benign. The trees, wind, rocks and the Others were her knights, her personal bodyguard, hers mothers.
She was no bigger than a snack for any prowling mountain lion, mostly naked except for some sawed off jeans and a holey tee shirt, streaking down deer trails, bounding barefooted over fallen branches, past coiled rattlesnakes, moving like the deer that were her teachers.
It was too erotic to explain. Each smell was distinct. The Mountain Misery was tarry, leaf mold musky, manzanita flowers delicate and sweet as fairy honey. These smells, compounded by wind and sun, were a perfume of volatilized scents so sensuous that it dizzied and elated her and got her high.
Later, in the ‘60s when everyone was getting stoned, she tried it and found it pitiable. That was what they thought was high? The smell of buck brush blooming, rising up-canyon on a full moon night, capped acid by some measurement known only to physics – light years or megawatts or angstroms.
And that was just the smells. There were all the other senses left to indulge – like sound! There on the mountain, the wind always speaks in a low moan through the pine boughs, day and night. And in a storm? The voice of the gods! Wotan bemoaning his scooped-out eye! Isis anguishing for lost Osiris!
And the conversation of birds and animals is the sub-text; trilling and hooting, coughing and chattering, howling and snuffling – a poetry too mellifluous, a symphony too polyphonic to convey. We rational beings, so stunted, asensual and sad, lack the vocabulary or the instrumentation. We grownups.
She’s carried those childhood experiences with her into adulthood and that, she supposes, is why her dreams are so vivid and premonitory now. In sleep, that well-honed instinctual self is still roaming the woods of the unconscious, picking up cues.
So, many mornings she’s gone through her routine in a daze, still pondering the inner images and whisperings, and just waking to the gossip of the natural world. First thing every morning, she puts the kettle on for tea before going out into the cold morning wind to split kindling and lug in firewood, so the wood stove can take the chill off the house.
This time of year, the east wind is a gale as she steps out into the dawn light. It cuts right through the wood-hauling jacket she always throws on, that’s snagged from hugging oak logs close to her chest and sticky in spots from pine pitch.
Splitting sticks of kindling off the straight grain of a cedar round, she uses the strokes as a metronome to orchestrate the images of the last night’s dream – like the one she had just before she flew down here to L.A...
She’s in a city intersection, surrounded by buildings. Power poles support scalloped black cables that cross the intersection diagonally, marking a big X in the yellow sky. She’s under the X in the center of the intersection with traffic rocketing all around her, not paying her the slightest heed. She looks over her shoulder and sees a white delivery van bearing down on her. There’s no way to escape. A step in any direction and she’ll be mowed down by traffic. She stands there helpless
ly as the bumper of the truck comes at her like the lowered horns of a bull.
And then, of course, she wakes up, with her heart pounding.
So while she’s still lost in those images, she’s pulling back a black plastic tarp and beginning to stack wood in the crook of her left elbow; a few small pieces of limb wood to feed the first flames from the kindling, some medium-sized logs to add next, and just at the edge of her arm’s strength, one big split of oak to top things off.
She lays the fire the same way every time, with crumpled newspaper first, then crossed sticks of kindling, a couple of thin pieces of limb wood balanced on top of that. That just about fills the firebox. She closes the damper so the updraft won’t blow out the match and lays the flame against the bottom wad, where it hesitates before grabbing hold of the paper and then eats greedily.
When the fire’s fully engaged, she opens the damper and the heat rushes up the stovepipe with a roar like the afterburner on a jet. Once she hears that sound, she can relax. When a stove draws like that, a fire isn’t going to smolder down to nothing; it’s going to burn like a barn in August.
Winter on the mountain can be trying. Storms race in from the Pacific and dump rain or snow, then keep blowing eastward until they thump up against the Sierra crest where they moil and toil around a day or two, dropping snow and scouring the peaks with wind. Then the clouds wheel around and come charging down from the heights laden with cold they’ve picked up over the eternal snow-fields and glaciers.
When they reach the high foothills where she lives, they’re moving with the power and speed of a runaway freight train and, because the house sits right on a ridge, the east winds slam into it like the Furies. The whole house concusses, as if it were being beaten by a giant sledgehammer.